Nawaf Saah

Nawaf Saah (10 October 1951-30 September 2013) was a Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) politician of the Syrian Arab Republic.

Biography
Nawaf Saah was born on 10 October 1951 in Damascus, Syria to a family of Greek Orthodox Christians. Saah lived in a country that was 10% Christian, and he was a member of a minority religion; he figured that the way to stop religious violence was to enforce secularism. He became a Marxist, believing in socialism, secularism, and nationalism, believing in the idea of a Greater Syria in which the secular socialist government would rule the Levant. This, he believed, would make the Middle East a peaceful area in which all groups could live equally. However, he shared the SSNP's views of anti-Semitism, as the SSNP were against the statehood of Israel. Saah became a politician under Hafez al-Assad's government in the 1970s and 1980s, and he ran for local office in Rif Dimashq Governorate as a candidate for mayor of Damascus. He was not given a seat in the government, but he became a senior SSNP official. Saah was instrumental in creating militias to support Bashar al-Assad's government in the Syrian Civil War against the Sunni extremists, and on 30 September 2013 he was killed in a Jaysh al-Islam rocket attack on Damascus.